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Microsoft finished up their press conference about an hour and a half ago, leaving CoNchat generally underwhelmed. Of course, for the people in there who remain avid RPG gamers, the Microsoft speech tends to be a bit of a famine, so maybe we're not all the target market for such things.

It was second in the show, but since it's the closest to Square Enix they had, we'll lead with Tomb Raider. It was a very pretty game, and looked very much like what you'd want in a Tomb Raider made fifteen years after the original, with an added little dash of bondage at the beginning. If you ever wanted to see Lara be trussed upside down, have to light herself on fire to escape, and then fall and break a rib, then, Eidos is bringing you just what you want.

Microsoft and their partners covered quite a few games, and among them were the ones you fully expected to see, starting with a full ten minutes of Modern Warfare 3, which looked pretty much like Modern Warfare 2, if you ask me. The post-Bungie Halo era moved on with both a remake of the very first game and an announcement for Halo 4. Every one of these games got a huge reaction from the crowd - call me a complainer, but I didn't see any of that stuff do anything so interesting that it demanded screams of joy. Someone thinks it's truly groundbreaking, though, or the excitement of being in the room with such a big screen really added to the impact.

Microsoft showed off their new dashboard, with an emphasis on the new non-gaming or gaming-related content to be on offer. They made a very big deal out of the addition of YouTube, and a Kinected Bing application to find games and media available for the Xbox. They also did a lot of talk about live television over Xbox, but honestly, I'm not going to get very excited about that; they still can't even give me live ESPN3 due to an ongoing dispute with Time Warner Cable that has been going on for almost a year now.

The rest was a big push to get Kinect more on the minds of not only kids and casual gamers, but the "hardcore" set as well. Games like Ghost Recon, Fable, Ryse, Star Wars (which, by the way, looked just awful, to me) and even Minecraft are looking to really make people take Kinect seriously, while a new sports game, a Sesame Street game, and a Disneyland exploration application/game will appeal to the casual and younger sets. I have to say, the last two excited me the most, but that might just be because I have baby on the brain.

What'd you guys think? Does Microsoft have anything that excites you for the next year?

Quote of the Microsoft conference came in from CoNChat, not surprisingly. It was Kappa the Imp, responding to the Sesame Street Kinect game:

[12:39] Kappa: Who else can imagine all their pothead friends going CRAZY over this

Square Enix are preparing for E3, of course; it officially starts next Tuesday. For us, they're mainly doing it with a microsite that, as of this writing, doesn't work. If you care to find a metaphor in that for your faith in the company, well, I won't stop you. Hopefully it comes back online soon, though, as the site last year was really pretty nice, as I recall.

Square Enix are only talking about a few of the games that they'll be showing, and I haven't yet found any mention of a standalone presser that will be aired anywhere public. I don't believe they did one last year, either, so we'll have to feast on scraps that we get second-hand. For now, though, we do know of several games that will appear; of most interest to RPG fans will be Final Fantasy XIII-2 and WAKFU. However, Tomb Raider, the new Hitman, Deus Ex, Dead Island, and the new 3DS game Heroes of Ruin also headline the offering. There's no mention of Type-0 or Dream Drop Distance in the press release, but there's little doubt that they'll be in the booth in some fashion, surely, along with some other big-ticket games that escape my mind at the moment.

As for CoN, we're going to cover E3 the way we did last year, I think, as much as possible. That means that we'll be watching the big three press conferences in chat, as well as posting live thoughts about the offerings to Twitter and Facebook. After each of the big pressers, one of us will write up a kinda-bloggy recap for CoN news as well. If you want to participate, all you have to do is follow us on Twitter (@cavesofnarshe) or on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/cavesofnarshe), come to chat to make snide comments about the games you're seeing, or watch this space for the wrap-up news.

If you're on Facebook or Twitter, we'd love it if you'd reference us in your own tweets or posts about E3, or if you'd retweet or share our comments to your own network. Help us keep our following growing by making sure all seven of your friends know about us!

Source: Square Enix, Kotaku

Slowly but surely, Distant Worlds is becoming less distant to more and more Final Fantasy fans, as the tour adds more dates that cover more geographical areas in North America. Sorry, overseas fans, but no new dates for you in this update; however, as consolation, the DVDs I mentioned in my last Distant Worlds post are now available from AmaCoN US and AmaCoN UK.

A brief rundown of the new dates:

• Houston, 16 July 2011
• Vancouver, 27 July 2011 (with Uematsu)
• Baltimore, 9 and 10 September 2011 (with Uematsu)
• Los Angeles, 5 November 2011
• Kitchener, Ontario, 28 February 2012
• St. Louis, Missouri, 23 and 24 March, 2012
• Toronto, 31 March 2012 (with Uematsu)

For presale dates and all other information, hit the Distant Worlds site below.

Source: Distant Worlds

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, the 2007 PSP remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, will be released on iOS compatible devices in June or July of this year. First announced to be coming to those platforms at E3 2010, soon iPhone and iPad users will be able to enjoy the game with a new touch-friendly interface and slightly wider viewing window.

Square-Enix has not given an official, concrete release date for the game yet, but promises the iPhone version will land in June or July. The iPad version may take a little longer to hit Apple's app store due to the challenges presented by developing for a the larger screen, but one of the game's producers assured fans that the gap between formats will not be a long one.

Source: Square Enix's Facebook page

As an apology for the recent hacking and outage of the PlayStation Network, Sony is offering free games to PS3 and PSP owners who lost service during the outage. In addition, users will receive 30 days of free PlayStation Plus service and free rentals from their online video rental service.

To claim your free games, just log onto the PSN Store anytime the first 30 days after it's restored (which it should be soon) and download the games. Two game downloads from the list of available games are allowed for each system - 2 for PS3 and 2 for PSP. Five games are available for each platform, including the critically acclaimed inFamous on PS3 and LittleBigPlanet on both the PSP and PS3. Check the listed source for the full menu of free games and other stipulations of the deal.

This is for the North American PSN Store only; other regions will likely have their own "customer appreciation packages" announced later on. I dunno about you guys, but I'll be getting my Wipeout on at the first opportunity.

Source: North American PlayStation Blog

You might recall laszlow's post from a couple months back, in which we, the gamers, were invited to vote upon which games should be included in their retrospective. Time has flown, and now the results have been made public - well, people who voted got the results an hour ago, but now they're actually public.

So, how did your favorite games do? If you're thinking specifically of Square Enix games, they did pretty okay. For the PlayStation, three of the four games came from the old Squaresoft: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Einhander. Beyond that, though, not so hot; Final Fantasy lost to Zelda, Chrono Trigger also lost to Zelda, and Actraiser whiffed against the first Sim City on SNES.

I think a fair number of the results were pretty predictable, but that's probably because a lot of the games are either truly impressive, had lax competition in their categories, or both. I happily greeted the news that Bioshock and Portal both got in, personally, and was quite amused to see Minecraft topple the Starcraft II juggernaut. To form your own opinions, just hit the source link below.

Source: Smithsonian Institute